Over the weekend, I found out a pretty interesting fact: Joe Biden can eliminate the filibuster. The Vice President is also the president of the Senate, and this fact combined with some “complicated and highly controversial maneuver” guaranteed by Senate rules would allow him to modify the filibuster or ditch it altogether—if he can get [...]
A perennial question in representative democracy is whether or not it’s worth it to vote. My colleague Leslie Horwitz discussed how an individual ballot is worth only a tiny fraction of the total vote, and in this case, many people question whether their vote makes any difference. And Michael De Dora is a proponent of [...]
Last night was a big night for Republicans: they took the House – with about 240 seats – and made big gains in the Senate. It’s highly likely that in the next two years of divided government, a lot of work – for example, with healthcare – just won’t get done. So are we really in for 24 months [...]
I don’t know how I missed it, but the NYT philosophy column The Stone ran perhaps its best piece to date a couple weeks ago. In it, philosophy professor Judith Lichtenberg, of Georgetown University argues that there is such a thing as pure altruism, i.e., that sometimes we may, in fact, act solely for the good of other people, [...]
In the past I’ve been rather critical of Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) education program, but I read something yesterday that’s prompted me to take a more nuanced position. Yesterday Matt Yglesias discussed an Education Week piece by Sara Mead that questioned the efficacy of pre-kindergarten programs. Yglesias doesn’t find fault with this research, but he doesn’t think it damns [...]
I just found out yesterday that Slate is blogging the periodic table, devoting posts to little discussions of the squares on the periodic table. Here’s a little tidbit, for instance, about boron: Boron is carbon’s neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of [...]
